Incidents Make Jews Wary, 75 Years After Hitler Annexed Austria

Shoes Too Big
“This community is living in shoes that are too big for it,” said Rabinovici, best known in English for his book “Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna 1938-1945”.

Before the 1938 annexation, the “Anschluss”, Austria’s Jewish population was 195,000, the same size as present-day Linz, a provincial capital not far from Hitler’s birthplace.

Two-thirds of them were driven out in the “Aryanisation” program immediately following the Anschluss and all but about 2,000 left behind were killed in concentration camps. Today’s Austrian Jewish community is almost entirely in Vienna.

“The most terrible thing was not the way hundreds of thousands of Austrians celebrated Hitler’s arrival, but the enthusiasm with which they dispossessed the Jews,” recalled Ari Rath, a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna at the age of 13.

Rath, who went on to become the long-time editor of the Jerusalem Post, was back in the city of his birth speaking to a group of schoolchildren about his experiences, as part of a parliament-sponsored education project.

“We went from being people to non-persons overnight,” he said in fluent German, a language he suppressed for decades.

“It’s a different Austria now, but you cannot forget it took until 41 years after the war … before Austrians began seriously to confront the Nazi past of this country.”

He was referring to the so-called Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980s, in which President Kurt Waldheim was outed as having hidden his knowledge of German atrocities during his wartime past as a Nazi military officer. The case triggered a long-suppressed international debate about Austria’s history.

Austrians, many of whom had wanted a union with Germany, maintained for decades that their country was Hitler’s first victim, ignoring the fact that huge, cheering crowds had greeted Hitler in March 1938 with flowers, Nazi flags and salutes.

Within days of March 12, tens of thousands of Jews and dissenters were under arrest, imprisoned or packed off to concentration camps. Jews were shut out of jobs and schools, forced to wear yellow badges and had their property confiscated.

Demanding, Not Begging
Ariel Muzicant served as president of Austria’s official Jewish organization, the IKG, from 1998 until last year.

As a young activist during the Waldheim affair, he was key in persuading the IKG to break with its low profile and tackle the backlash of anti-Jewish feeling that the affair unleashed.

“I did not just go and beg. I told them: ‘These are our rights as a Jewish community. These are our demands.’ I wasn’t what you would call a very silent, docile president,” he said.

Muzicant’s drive led to the restitution of Jewish property, laws to recognize Jewish institutions and customs, and the rebuilding or new construction of schools and synagogues.

Things are not perfect, he said, but they could be a lot worse. “Vienna is one of the most beautiful places in the world. If you’re not Jewish, there’s no better place to live.”

Muzicant’s successor at the IKG’s helm, Oskar Deutsch, has a less confrontational approach. “You don’t want to escalate it,” he said. “But it’s a short way from words to deeds.”

The IKG says the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Austria of which it knows doubled last year to 135.

More common than overt attacks in Austria, where strict laws ban Nazi symbolism and parties, are appeals to shared prejudices through remarks or actions that go mostly unchallenged.

The anti-foreigner Freedom Party of Heinz-Christian Strache, who posted the disputed cartoon, consistently scores above 20 percent in opinion polls and has a chance of joining a coalition government after elections this year.

Still, many Viennese Jews freely stroll through the streets in Orthodox garb, especially in districts such as Leopoldstadt, the former Jewish ghetto where many Jews live again today.

The IKG, while condemning anti-Jewish actions anywhere, is hoping to take advantage of the comparatively favorable position of Jews in Austria to boost its depleted population.

It is working with the government to bring at least 150 Jewish families a year into the country, and has already helped some 20 families from neighboring Hungary.

Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Mark Heinrich

© 2013 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.